


Practice Bout

by UrsulaKohl



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Academy, Cadets, Fencing, M/M, Promises, Swords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 10:32:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19332778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrsulaKohl/pseuds/UrsulaKohl
Summary: Aral and Ges were both at loose ends, on this unexpected holiday. It was a good time to spar.





	Practice Bout

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etothey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/gifts).



The Commandant, in his beneficence, had declared a half-holiday. Most of the upperclassmen seized the chance to wander Vorbarr Sultana in uniform, extracting compliments and trying not to get powdered sugar on their coats. Some of Aral's friends had gone hiking. Aral was trying to finish an essay, the same essay on the second-order strategic effects of wormhole placement he'd been wrapped up in all week. He got up very early, drank two pots of coffee, and finally thrashed a conclusion onto the page in the weird stillness of the half-empty campus noon. He scrounged a forgettable sandwich and then went looking for someone to talk to, anyone to bring his mind back to the physical world, away from linking diagrams of stars.

Aral found Ges in the science library. He was sitting at a desk by the far wall and had loaded a military-architecture manual onto the screen, ostensibly to study. The afternoon light slanting through the narrow window was so bright that the text had to be illegible. Ges wasn't looking at the screen, anyway. He was staring up and to the left, toward the point where the black metal window frame met the slab of concrete. His eyes were unfocused and his lips curled down in a way that suggested he was only watching a scene inside his mind. It was odd to find Ges looking so distant, odd enough that Aral said cautiously, "Hey. Are you all right?"

Ges turned toward Aral and blinked, slowly, reorienting himself to the world at hand. "Yes." 

Aral raised an eyebrow. He had been practicing, against the day he had to project an officer's skepticism.

They watched each other for a long moment. Aral noticed the hum of the library's ventilation system switching on. Ges had unusually long eyelashes. They brushed against his cheek when he blinked. Finally Ges said, "No, I'm not really all right." Then he shook himself and laughed, with the sudden glee of a puppy that has discovered jumping in and out of lakes, and wants to share the fun. "Would you like to spar?"

If Ges could mentally set aside whatever had been troubling him, Aral would cooperate. He said, "Why not? Shall we find our masks?"

The gym was around the corner from the library, while the dorms were about a kilometer away and down a steep hill. Some cadets speculated that their placement was intended to make the jog to breakfast more painful. Aral wasn't surprised when Ges said, "Let's skip the gear, and drill half-speed."

The entrance desk to the gym was staffed by a second-year cadet with a sullen expression and a five-space math textbook. He left off drawing hatched line patterns in the textbook margins long enough to take their identity cards and issue them each a practice sword. (Cadets who requested a second sword, outside club practice times, tended to attract official attention.) Ges and Aral turfed a trio of younger cadets out of the good practice room with the padded floor, and stripped off their jackets and shirts. Ges's undershirt was a soft, gray, decidedly not regulation fabric. The muscles on his right arm stood out as he raised his sword into a high guard position. You could make an anatomy lesson of him, Aral thought. _This is the shape of an ideal cadet._

They started at quarter-speed, slow and careful, working through the beginning of the standard forms. They were well-matched, of a similar height and each with a good grasp of measure. Aral's footwork was slightly more precise, but Ges's transitions flowed more smoothly. They stepped up the pace and repeated the sequence. 

When Ges said, "Free-form, now?" Aral was ready. He grabbed Ges's wrist with his left hand, and aimed his own sword straight at Ges's eyes. Like much of the Barrayaran sword-fighting repertoire, this move was born of pragmatism. The long-ago imperial accountants, their swords barely longer than kitchen knives, had lacked patience for elaborate conventions of sportsmanship. As a training move, the wrist-grab had the added advantage that it forced the attacker to get used to moving his left hand, in preparation for wielding a second sword.

"Point to you!" Ges said, with a grin. They reset, began again, and traded points back and forth for a little while. Then Ges dropped into a low guard, and Aral rotated his sword, striking toward his friend's head with the edge of the blade. Ges brought his sword up to parry, and kept moving, wrapping his arm around Aral's as he stepped in. Aral's arm twisted back, caught, his sword useless. He felt the straight line of his bone, the pressure in his elbow, half a thought away from pain. His joint was well and truly locked. 

Aral let his eyes travel up from the tip of Ges's sword to Ges's eyes. "The point is yours," he told him. Ges didn't move. 

Aral's gaze was trapped, now, too. Ges's pupils were very wide. Looking away would hurt: the energy fizzing beneath Aral's skin would rush out of him somehow, cutting his lungs, stinging. He was breathing too fast. 

Ges twisted Aral's arm just a little bit farther, and smiled. "Stop," Aral told him. Through the brightness of ordinary pain, he noticed a shiver running through Ges's body, and knew that Ges saw him noticing. 

"Do you despise me?" Ges asked. He eased the pressure on Aral's joints, but did not step away. 

Aral answered, slowly, "I will not criticize what I would do myself."

"Promise you will always judge me as fairly?" Ges asked. There was laughter in his voice, but Aral could hear the fear and hope beneath it, swirled all together like honey through long-steeped canteen tea. 

"Of course," Aral said. "I promise." The words came easily, with the inevitability of a complete truth. The kiss that followed seemed as easy. Their faces were already close; they had only to let their swords drop, relax, lean forward. Ges tasted sharp, like sugar lingering on the tongue, or the hint of iron in one's mouth after a long, hard race. He curled a hand at the base of Aral's neck, biting his lower lip. 

This was Aral's first kiss. He had assumed it would happen in a garden, that he would slip away from a dance with a girl wearing white, after expressing more or less honorable intentions. He had not expected to be listening for footsteps in the hallway, had not expected the strength of the hand gripping his shoulder. He had not expected to be so certain that this motion was—not right, but required, his body and his friend's matched for this one purpose. 

He would ask himself, later, what that mirroring meant. He knew how it hurt to hold Ges, the scratch of someone's nails, the barbs that drew them in together. What was it, precisely, that Aral had promised? He could list his own wrongs, the anger, the refusal to bend. If he could map out all the brambles and scars that came with holding Ges close—had he not given his word?

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Cathexys for beta-reading!
> 
> My Barrayaran fencing is inspired by interpretations of the Fiore manuals; you can watch a demonstration including some of Ges and Aral's moves [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFXoaQYb_j4).


End file.
